


Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree

by papofglencoe



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 22:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3746428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papofglencoe/pseuds/papofglencoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: Peeta finds himself at the mercy of the Capitol after his capture from the Quarter Quell. Inspired by 1984.</p>
<p>Canon-compliant</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree

My hands are still slick with Brutus’ blood, my machete tucked under my arm, when the hovercrafts from the Capitol locate me. I can hear her screams echoing in my ears, calling my name on an endless loop, and my pupils are still contracted from the explosion of light that had illuminated the entire dome of the arena at midnight. I’m thrashing blindly through the forest, vines scratching at my face, stumbling with each step, trying to get back to where she was, when a ladder descends in front of me. I feel the stern grasp of a Peacekeeper on my arm, the jab of a needle, and then I lose consciousness. 

****

I awaken in a small slate-colored cell. It’s spartanly furnished, and what little there is matches the cold concrete walls. I’m laying on a metal platform that serves as the bed, and next to me is the toilet. Across the room, there’s a metal chair. That’s the entirety of the room’s contents. There are no windows, no clocks, nothing to give me an indication of what time it is or how much has passed since I was captured.

I’ve been bathed and changed into a nondescript white uniform. Even the blood and dirt that had been caked under my fingernails have been removed. 

I lay there for what could be minutes or hours or days. I’m in agony. I can’t believe I lost her. What’s happened to her? Is it possible that she’s dead, that they’re all dead, and I’m what’s left? I’m so fucking stupid. I let her go. And now I’m here, in this cell, and I’ll never see her again. 

I think of her, of what she said to me that last night on the beach, and I turn it over again and again in my mind, weighing all its meaning and implications. She said she needed me, and I believed her. I don’t want to believe her because there is nothing I can do about it. She’s probably dead, and, if she’s not, then I will be soon. It doesn’t matter if she loves me or I love her. We’re dead. I’ve lost her.

I’m laying on the platform with my forearm covering my eyes when I hear the heavy metal door open with a bang. I bolt upright, and see a slight, middle-aged woman enter the room. She’s wearing a lab coat, her hair pulled back tightly into a bun, and holding a clipboard. She has a stethoscope around her neck. A doctor. She has a kind face, I find myself thinking involuntarily. Her eyes are so brown they almost appear black. 

“Where am I? What’s going on here?” I demand before she’s had the chance to speak.

She walks toward me, sitting next to me on the platform. She extends her hand, and when she speaks her voice is soft and lilting. 

“I’m Dr. Clement, Peeta, but you can call me Vera if you’d like. I’ll answer all your questions.”

I look skeptically at her outstretched hand, but if I’m to get any answers, then she might be the best shot that I have. I take her hand, briefly shaking it, and then repeat, “Where am I?”

“You’re in the Capitol, Peeta. The Quell ended abruptly two days ago, and we’ve kept you under sedation since then to treat your injuries. May I?” She holds out her stethoscope, indicating that she’d like to take my vitals. I nod.

Her touch is gentle, her hands cold. She smiles, pleased by what she hears, and then asks, “What do you want to know?” 

It’s almost too painful to ask, but I have to know. My voice comes out as a croak. “Is she… is she alive?”

Dr. Clement gives me a pitying look, and my stomach drops. I’m sorry I asked, because I can’t bear to hear the answer. The doctor nods, though, and dispels my panic. “Yes, Peeta, Katniss Everdeen is still alive.”

“Where is she?” I ask in a whisper.

“That’s complicated,” Dr. Clement begins, and her voice is edged with hesitation. “You see, there is a rebellion taking place in various districts around the country. It’s disorganized, nothing more, really, than labor strikes. But the leadership of the rebellion hopes to unify the protesters, and so they recruited Katniss Everdeen. This involved subverting the Games and removing her from the arena. She’s with them, Peeta.”

She looks at me in concern as I piece this new information together. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asks, gently. “There is a rebellion, and Katniss Everdeen is working for it. I doubt she has much control over what happens, but if they hope to use her as a symbol of rebellion, many innocent lives stand to be lost by an all-out war.” 

I shake my head. A rebellion? That would mean others would have known of the plot to rescue her from the arena. It begins to make sense, though, why the other tributes died to protect us. To protect her. It would mean that Haymitch knew about the rebellion and that he didn’t trust me enough to tell me. He could have told me… it would have reassured me that he was going to protect her. Haymitch could have fucking trusted me, but instead he treated me like a child and a fool. I’m incensed at the betrayal. 

“What happened at midnight? In the arena, Dr. Clement?”

“Vera. It’s Vera.” She places a hand on my knee, maternally. “Would you like to see the tapes?”

I nod. 

“Excellent. Then I’ll arrange it. I’m also going to ask the guards to provide you with a pillow and blankets. You won’t hurt yourself if we give you those items, will you?”

I frown and shake my head. 

The swiftness of my response makes her smile. “No, of course not. I’ll also ask them to bring in a deck of cards for you. It’s not much, but it should keep you occupied for a bit.”

She stands up to leave the room, and as she walks away, I call to her back, “What are they going to do with me?”

She pauses, turns around to face me. “They’re going to interview you tonight. You’re medically fit, so I’m going to authorize it. I trust that’s okay with you?”

I sigh. “Yeah, I guess that’s okay.” I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and anxiously run my hands through my hair.

“And once our officials have asked you some questions and run a background check, they’re going to let you go home.” 

I want to believe the doctor. She has a trustworthy face, and she’s been gentle and honest with me so far. Maybe they will allow me to return to District 12. But what are they going to do to Katniss? I can’t see this playing out well. 

If she’s alive, then we’re still in the Games. And I will do anything, say anything, to protect her. There’s nothing else in the world that matters. Everything else is so far away, it’s just shadows and smoke. Now there is only her.

***

I want nothing more than to die, for this to end. How long have I been here? Weeks, I think. I don’t know. I can’t sleep. They don’t let me sleep. 

After my interview with Caesar they moved me into a bare white room marked “Room 101.” There is a medical examination table in the center of the room and nothing else. They make me sleep on the floor, and when it’s time to question me they move me to the table.

I don’t recognize their faces. I haven’t seen any of them before. Dr. Clement has not returned. I’m alone. So hopelessly alone, and not even the memory of Katniss’ face or how her lips felt on mine can alleviate the pain they inflict on me.

They ask me questions about things to which I don’t have answers. About rebel plots, the leadership, their base and tactics. They want names, dates. They assume that Katniss and I are allied in a grand scheme to undermine the entirety of Panem. When I don’t have answers, when I don’t incriminate her, they hurt me. 

The electric shocks are excruciating. I scream. I can hear others screaming, too, in other cells. Or are the screams in my head? Are there others trapped in my head screaming with me? I don’t know.

They put a cloth on my face and pour water on me until I’m choking and gagging and my lungs are burning, and then I’m vomiting. I’m crying, and they don’t stop. They never stop. 

They whip me and tear at me and poke me until I pass out.

I’m starving, but they don’t feed me. And when I fall asleep, they dump icy water over me and leave me, chained to the floor, in a freezing, shuddering pile.

They’ve done things to me that should never be named.

***

After my next interview with Caesar, Dr. Clement intercepts my guards as they lead me back to Room 101.

She puts a hand on the chest of the leader, physically stopping him in his tracks. “You’ll go no further. I’m taking the boy with me.”

They don’t question her, and she steps around them and gently takes my arm, steering me in a different direction. She wraps her arm delicately around my shoulder and guides me into a room that must be her office. She gestures to a leather arm chair and says, “Please. Sit.”

I obey. I mean to lower myself gingerly into the chair, but I end up collapsing into it. I can’t seem to stop sweating, and my hands uncontrollably tremor. I’m aching everywhere. I can’t name what hurts anymore.

“Here,” she says, and slides her tea cup toward me. She rummages through her desk and locates a package of cookies. “And eat these,” she instructs.

I don’t question her. I finish the tea in one gulp and then devour the cookies. The food makes my empty stomach hurt. 

Dr. Clement picks up her phone and instructs someone on the other end to bring some fruit and bread to her office. After she hangs up, she faces me, her face pale.

“I had no idea they were hurting you.” She walks over to me and stoops beside me, causing me to flinch. “God, what have they done to you?” she wonders aloud. She takes my hand. The warmth of her hand, her soft skin, makes me begin to cry, whimpering pathetically. I can’t help it. I don’t have anything to say.

The doctor breaks the silence. “Look, Peeta, I don’t think I can intervene on your behalf. I’ll of course petition for the immediate cessation of your interrogation, but national security officers don’t answer to me.”

I look at her, pleadingly. “What do I do?”

She sighs, looking down. “You’ll have to stop protecting her. I know you think she needs it- that she deserves it- but she doesn’t. She isn’t worth dying for, Peeta. No one is.”

“But I love her,” I whisper. It is the first time I have ever said it aloud to another person. I’ve said it to myself in the quiet watches of the night, but I’ve never admitted this to anyone else. I wanted her to be the first to know, and now she never will. I’m a dead man. A broken, dying man. 

Dr. Clement looks at me with her dark brown eyes and asks, “But do you know her… really? You say you love her, but do you know who she is? What she’s done?”

I frown at the question. “Y-yes. Of course I do. I know she’d die for me.” I’m so tired, so confused, I’m finding it hard to think.

“I know you think there’s something noble in dying, but, Peeta, there’s something I need to show you. And I’m so terribly sorry to have to show you when you’re in this condition, but I fear there’s no other way to help you.”

She turns on her projection monitor, and then I can see Katniss. It’s some sort of commercial, I think. She’s dressed in a black uniform, holding a bow. She looks healthy, but she’s furious. She’s standing among smoldering rubble, and her words are violent, taunting: I want to tell the Capitol that I am alive. That I’m here in District 8, where the rebels just bombed a hospital. There will be no survivors. President Snow says he’s sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. Do you see that? Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!

The rebels that she’s allied herself with… they’re bombing hospitals to prove a political point. And she’s a leader, somehow, and has killed those innocent people. 

“I… I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, and I lean over and vomit into the doctor’s trashbin. 

She rubs my back, and while she’s doing this someone enters the room. She must wave them away, because when I sit back up, we’re alone and there’s a plate of food on her desk.

“You need to eat, Peeta. Your body is shutting down.” She sits behind her desk and pushes the plate toward me. “But eat slowly.”

I nod and eat as slowly as I can.

“We need to talk about Katniss, Peeta. Some alarming things have come to light about her, about her family’s past.”

I drop the bread, no longer hungry. My mouth is dry as ash. “What about her family?” I ask.

Dr. Clement leans forward, crossing her fingers together as if in prayer. “Well, it turns out that her father was an operative for District 13.”

“District 13?” I ask, incredulous. “There is no District 13.” 

“There is, Peeta, and that’s the base of operations for the rebellion. Katniss has defected to them, has turned her back on her own people. Recent intelligence suggests that she was recruited by District 13 operatives prior to the 74th Games. We have surveillance of operatives consulting with her near the woods that border your district. A man by the name of Darius, who fronted as a Peacekeeper, and a woman named Lavinia. We have both of these individuals in custody, and they’re willing to testify to this.

I think of Darius, of his easy demeanor around Katniss, and I think that maybe there is some truth to what the doctor is saying. For a Peacekeeper, he and Katniss always had a peculiar rapport.

The doctors continues her explanation, “Katniss’s father wasn’t killed in an accidental explosion in the mines, Peeta. It was a terrorist attack… he deliberately caused the explosion to disrupt the supply of Coal into the other districts. He was a plant. Why else do you think a merchant’s girl would have married a coal miner? No, he was a highly intelligent, influential, manipulative man. And his daughter takes a great deal after him.” 

I’m pale, shaking. I’m having a hard time keeping my head up. 

“Peeta,” Dr. Clement beseeches me, “I know you think you’re making a sacrifice out of love for Katniss. But you don’t even know her. And she doesn’t love you. She’s only ever manipulated you for her own survival. Like in the first Games? She was going to kill you until the rule change allowed her to keep you around. How else was she going to overpower Cato? Remember how she dropped the tracker jackers on you without a second thought?” 

“I have one more thing to show you,” she adds. And then I see the surveillance footage of Katniss kissing Gale. “She doesn’t love you, Peeta. She loves him. You were only ever a pawn to her.”

I’m crying then, my face in my hands, and she calls the guards to return me to my room. She warns them as they lift me up, “Treat him gently, and no more interrogation. Or you’ll have to answer to my boss.”

***

Dr. Clement has ordered a new therapy for me to aid in their interrogations. The torture has ended. Now, they inject me with a truth serum. She holds my hand as they administer it to me, and she brushes my sweaty hair off my forehead. The serum has unpleasant side effects. It makes me afraid. It causes me to scream, but the pain is no longer physical. 

I imagine there is an avox girl in the room, and they electrocute her. She screams, guttural animal sounds, and then dies. Her vacant eyes stare at me, and she begins to sing with Katniss’s voice. Her cold, dead arms engulf me, and when she pulls away she has Katniss’ face. 

Darius the Peacekeeper is there, too, in my visions. They hack his limbs off, and he looks like a tree whose branches are snapping. His face is gnarled and contorted. I think of the woods, and the hunter that lurks within them. The woods are filled with screaming avoxes, and she is there, hunting them. She shoots them right in the eye.

The serum helps me see the truth, and so I tell them she is dangerous. Katniss is a threat to Panem.

Dr. Clement holds my hand, tells me not to worry. They’ll be dead by morning. The nightmare is almost over.

***

I crack at some point in my third interview, when I hear her voice, I think. She is going to kill us all. In the Capitol, in District 13, we’ll all be dead by morning. I scream this, and then pray they’ll kill me now. We’re all dead anyway. Dead by morning. Dead by morning.

Feet kick at me, and I feel my blood splattering across my face. And I don’t fight, I don’t say a word. I just lay there, and they kick me. Dead by morning. Dead by morning.

***

They administer the serum, and then a shadowy figure enters the room. I can’t see their face because the overhead lights are off, and there’s only this one spotlight shining in my eyes. So brightly that I’m blind. I can hear screams, but now I know they’re only in my head. 

I’m chained to the floor, my back to the wall, and I can feel the wall’s fingers digging into my spine. 

The figure is carrying a large box, which hangs by their side. I can hear movement inside the box. Snickering, chattering. 

The figure stays in the undulating shadows. The shadows leap forward and nip at my face, and I swing my head from side to side to avoid their burning glances. 

The figure speaks in her voice. In Dr. Clement’s voice. She steps forward so that I can see her kind, benevolent face. She is beaming at me.

“You’re almost ready to go home, dear boy. And I’m so very proud of you. But there is one thing left to do. One thing left we need to discuss.” She rests the box on the ground next to her, and then steps toward me, crouching. “We need to talk about Katniss, about what she is.”

I’m whimpering. “Wh-what do you mean? Please, Dr. Clement, tell me what you mean?”

“It’s Vera,” she insists. She leans over me, unbuttoning my shirt. She takes a scalpel from her lab coat, and swiftly, deftly, cuts a line down my chest. 

I can feel the lava, burning bright orange, as it trickles down my chest. My chest is a volcano, erupting. The lava stains my clothes red. 

“I’ll tell you what I mean, Peeta. About Katniss. You see, she’s not just a District 13 operative. She’s a mutt. She was made by District 13 to infiltrate our system. To spread filth and disease and death. You see, boy, don’t you? She’s a rat.” 

I see a crowd gathered behind her, in the shadows. They have wet cloths over their faces, and they’re sputtering water from their mouths. I hear retching and moaning, and I feel hot tears on my face.

She’s a rat? A filthy mutt?

Dr. Clement reaches for the box, reaches in and removes a rat. She holds its wriggling form in her hands. “Rats seems like such innocent things, don’t they? Covered in fur, so small. But leave them unattended, and they spread filth and plague. Leave them unattended, and they will eat you alive. They breed to destroy you.”

She places the rat on my chest, and it immediately begins to gnaw at my wound. I scream. “No, make it stop! Please make it stop!”

 

Dr. Clement reaches forward, prises the rat off my chest. “Do you know how you stop a rat, Peeta?” she asks.

I look into her eyes, crying, “How? How do you make it stop?”

“Dear boy, you strangle it.” In one swift movement, she snaps the neck of the rat. She tosses its lifeless form aside. 

I know everything that is inside that box, now. It’s filled with rats. They are pressing against each other, struggling to get out. To get to me, to my blood. They are going to eat me alive, kill me. 

“I- I don’t want to die,” I beg. 

Dr. Clement smiles at me. “And you won’t. I’ll protect you, keep these rats from you, as long as you tell me one thing.

I’m panicked, blurting, spittle flying, “I’ll tell you anything!”

“All right then. All you need to tell me… is that you don’t love her. That you never loved her.”

Her dark eyes meet mine, and she’s the only one that can save me. I lose myself in their comforting depths. I don’t want to die. And so I tell her, “I don’t love her. I never did.”

The doctor smiles, rises from her crouching place on the floor, and picks up the box. She places her hand on my shoulder. “Our work here is done,” she says, and then, “you’re free to go home.”

She leaves me alone in the room, and I sit there, crying softly until I fall asleep, relieved.


End file.
